Red
Red is the color of passion and heat and fire. Red is the color or both confusion and desire. Embarrassment fills your cheeks with red hot heat and flushes your face and your ego with red mask of shame. Flushing red feeling flush heat intolerance is a symptom of my Anxiety. I am anxious and embarrassed about my flushed cheeks so my cheeks flush and I feel more embarrassed and more flush and the anxiety rises. Heat intolerance is feeling uncontrollable heating when the temperature of the environment rises even 1 degree. Heat intolerance made my father think I was a prissy princess crying “I’m hot! I’m hot!” from the backseat as the temperature inside rose so readily I felt like I was going to explode in the South Florida heat and humidity and sunshine. The air coming from the A/C was always hot and wet first. Max A/C kept the must out. Max A/C took the longest to cool down but cooled down the most. “We are all hot!” he would yell back as if my daring to speak up about the discomfort was more than he could bare. WE ARE ALL HOT! It’s Florida for Christ sakes! Sitting in a managers meeting, the smallest room with the biggest men and as the temperature starts to rise, I feel my blood boiling under the surface. I feel the boil I feel the heat. I feel the flush. FLUSH. Royal flush, I hold the backs of my hands to my cheeks to attempt to cool them with my skin. I hold my hand against something that is cool and I pressed it to my heated throbbing skin hoping for relief as we discuss the quarterly projections and how we stack up for the quarter prior. “Danielle’s doing a great job!” My boss says which adds a deeper layer to the flushing that has flooded my face, not only heat intolerance but now embarrassment being called out, even for something good, in a room of my peers makes me feel like an apple polisher. A red apple. A treat for the teacher. I was always an apple polisher to be honest. I don’t understand how to do something half assed. I am by the book and task are completed from A-to-Z. I dabble in perfectionism and I challenge myself to complete any task I take on. I pride myself in my abilities and love the accomplishment of a job well done, I live on raise and actively reject it at the onset. Notice I am doing a good job, but don’t go on and on about it. Always the apple polisher, never the brown noser, I am not one to consider complimenting without merit or sucking up to someone. You either respect me for my work or you do not. The work speaks for itself. Red is the color of revolution, of change, or socialism and the symbol of the anger and fear it takes to charge a people. Red is m=y husbands favorite color. Red is every shirt on his shelf. Red is power. Red is a power tie. Red is my interview color. I used to wear a high neck red shirt under a black sweater to mimic a power tie. I nailed those interviews. Red is a fire around me. Red is Leo. Red is Lion. The rash starts red. A throbbing formal red in the shape of a butterfly. The rash does not go away. The red deepens until it is purple, but it does not go away. The malar rash is an indicator of my health. The malar rash means my body is sick. The malar rash is a badge of struggle passed from grandmother to mother to me. The malar rash is my warning. A flare up is coming. The flare. The heat. The flame. The flush. The rash. The power. Red is the start of the rainbow. Red is the color of lips and lust and blood. Red is the color of war and violence and death. Red is the color of birth and life. Red is life. From that first cell and the blood that pumps through the veins of the person who loves and laughs and embodies all of the human spirit in the liquid that moves oxygen and delivers life to the cells in the body.
726 words

April 24th 2017
750 words is a good practice I have done in the past to work on my writing chops and overcome writers block. I am trying to set myself free while somehow staying chained to my 9-5 job and living a pretty tied down life. I am a mother and a wife. I the sole bread-winner. I am a full-time college student. I am trying to build several arms of a home based business. I am trying to learn to become a home maker. And I am struggling with getting our family to the next level of home ownership and some semblance of wealth, not be cause I seek to be rich, but because I want my time back and my life back and myself back. Like so many of us, as I took on these burdens and learned how to be a wife and a mother and a family manager, I forgot how to be myself. I forgot the simple joys in crafting and writing and singing Ani Difranco and Fiona Apple. If I listen to them now I can close my eyes and picture the mountainous drives and the desert landscapes that have lived that soundtrack. I can close my eyes and smell the beach breeze. I feel the freedom of my youth and I ache for it. It is not the responsibility or the structure, I just miss the time I used to have for me. Time I never knew that I needed. Time I barely acknowledged before. I miss it now. I am settling into motherhood, my husband and I have roles and responsibilities that we are comfortable with. My life is happy and peaceful after years of struggle and some turmoil finding my footing. So now that things are stable, I plan on disrupting it by buying a house and trying to conceive another child. MORE CHILDREN. I am half convinced it will be twins again. I am half convinced I am already pregnant, 3 DPO but with super accurate timing and lots and lots of fun loving sex. I am also trying to get a grip on my health, eating Keto and trying be a new person. A fit person. A healthy person that says “Let’s go to the park” instead of “quiet, I can’t hear my shows!”. I have a pedometer and am allowing it to inspire me. I am beating personal goals and personal bests and I have a measurable standard to hold myself too. I am not sure how to combat a lifetime of feeling worthless. A life time of throwing myself away. I do not feel like I deserve this, not this life, not this husband, not these incredible kids. I feel like an imposter because no one ever told me that I was everything. That I was beautiful. That is was more than beauty. That I fit in. That I fit at all. Parenting brought up all the issues I didn’t know i had as I work, hard, to be a better parent to my kids. I want to show them that they have the whole world inside of them already. That they are everything. They are beautiful and smart and healthy and they are filled with love. They are made of love. So I work. I work on me. I need to be more than the result of my upbringing. I am stronger than the circumstances that created me. I have had to relearn and undo all the damage caused by people who really were doing the best they could. My mother thought her tragedy was romantic, luckily I never did. My father hates his mother. My mother does not but probably should. I hate none of them. I am beyond the why-me that we enter adulthood with. I have turned in my childhood cards and entered adulthood manually removing bad thoughts and replacing them with good ones. My kids are the reason I found my worth. I may have been a worthless daughter, but I will not be a worthless mother. I will not punish my kids for the faults of their great grandparents and I will not subject them to the abuse of my parents, because I am their protector. I will not allow my father to fill their heads with nonsense that makes them feel less-than. I will not allow my mother to make judgements about their bodies and alter the perceptions of themselves that will be built full of strength and whimsy and beautify. My kids will tear down the box that my childhood left me in an never package themselves up waiting to finally feel normal or complete, or pretty, or like everyone else. They may never be. And that will be celebrated. Maybe through them, I can learn to celebrate myself.